GCC 5 to be introduced in Fedora 22

Fedora 22 will ship with GCC 5, which brings a whole host of enhancements, among which is a new default C++ ABI. In this article, we’ll cover how that ABI transition will work in Fedora.

Background – what’s an ABI, why is it changing, and what does this mean for developers?

Put simply, binary compatibility means applications that are compiled
on a combination of an operating system and a particular hardware
architecture will load and run similarly across different instances of
the operating environment. Application binaries consist of executable
files and Dynamic Shared Objects (DSOs – the formal name for shared
libraries), and the level of compatibility is defined by a specific
application binary interface (ABI).

The development of new features in compilers, libraries and related
tools – and notably any new language standard those tools support – can
result in changes to the ABI, requiring that certain binaries need to be
re-built, or that newly built binaries are not directly compatible with
existing binaries Continue Reading